NTSB chairwoman: 'Striking' damage to Flight 214

7/7/13 9:28 AM EDT

The chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said on Sunday the damage to Flight 214 that crash landed in San Francisco was "striking."

"When we went out there last night and took a look at the aircraft, you can see the devastation from the outside of of the aircraft — the burn through, the damage to the external fuselage. What you can't see is the damage internally, and that is really striking," Deborah Hersman said on CNN's "State of the Union."

"We're going to have to corroborate a lot of information: the radar data, the ATC information and the flight data recorder parameters and also interview the pilots," she said.

"It's really important to put all you have the pieces of the puzzle together, to not just understand what happened, but understand why it happened so we can prevent accidents like this occurring in the future."